I was browsing the plasmoid section of kde-look today and found this little gem by DanaKil.

This was just what I needed to complete the following Gnome-emulation sexiness, straight from the Plasma department.

From a stark-default plasma session, the above took about 10 minutes tops to do, really showing the power of Plasma. I couldn’t get the top panel to look good before the spacer was released, though, because many of the widgets were taking up too much space. The systray was in the middle of the panel, for example. Plasma should probably space the widgets better, but until that happens the panelspacer widget will have to do.The widget theme is Oxygen Connections, my theme.

Oh, and here’s another one for good measure. It has a more Ubuntu feel I suppose:

Anyway, I had fun. With the right plasma theme and some tweaking to some widgets (Text for the launcher, etc) I’m sure somebody could create a Gnome clone that could fool people. Not that they’d want to, because Oxygen rocks. 😛

Eek, now that Harald (apachelogger) has ratted me out, I might as well blog about it.

So yeah, Harald basically resurrected the old kubuntu-team team that was replaced by the kubuntu-members team and re-purposed it as a bugmail funnel team, collecting bugmail from hopefully all Kubuntu-related packages. As Harald mentions I have had fun bug triaging lately, eheh. But as much fun as I am having, there still is plenty of fun to go around. Plenty of bugs to be triaged. Plenty of bugs that need to be forwarded on to KDE.

Bug triaging is a great way to help Kubuntu and the Linux software stack in general, even if a silly Suse head thinks that only patches to a limited, low-level portion of the software stack count. 😛 Most people won’t see the differences to much of the low-level stuffs, but they will probably have a better chance noticing the fixes to the parts they interact with day-to-day. This is not saying that the contributions to X, the kernel, etc aren’t welcome. (We need more of that too imo) But saying that you’re not contributing to Linux if you’re not contributing to the kernel is nonsense.

Eek, now this has turned into a rant. Back on topic.

Anyway, I’ve had fun with bug triaging lately. Currently the mostly-triaged packages in Launchpad include:

-adept-kdebase-runtime-kde4libs

We still need help keeping the above packages triaged, since bug reports never cease to be filed, but the following packages are more of a priority:

With kdepim we just have a lot of hard-to-test IMAP issues. Well, hard for people we don’t use IMAP. Basically we need people to: – Look at the existing reports and test for the bugs in KDE4. If they’re fixed in KDE4 close the bug saying that it seems to be fixed in KDE4, but if the user still has issues with KDE4 that they can reopen the bug.– General triaging. Finding dupes, etc.

If you would like to help, jump on irc at #kubuntu-devel on irc.freenode.net and ping people. My nick in JontheEchidna and Harald’s is apachelogger. We’d love the help.

KDE 4.1.1 has been released for both Kubuntu Intrepid Ibex and Hardy Heron. If you’re an astute Intrepid user you’ll notice that you’ve already received these updated a few days ago.Get it now!

The Kubuntu ninjas spent most of last week packaging KDE. (That is to say, waiting for stuff to compile. That’s why it takes so long :P)

So who are these guys providing Kubuntu users with the awesomest KDE 4 packages ever?

* JontheEchidna (aka Jonathan Thomas) Me! I like root beer… * vorian (aka Steve Stalcup) OMG! PONIES!1! * smarter (aka Guillaume Martres) still hasn’t applied for motu yet * Arby (aka Richard Birnie) wasn’t able to make it this time for the packaging spree, but he is appreciated all the same. * Riddell (aka jr or Jonathan Riddell), the almighty Kubuntu robot, who’s sponsoring the Intrepid uploads … he also can transform into an oracle if someone might have unanswerable questions * Harald Sitter (aka apachelogger) He ran out of beer. Then stayed awake for 30 hours. He also traded patches with Fedora and now we have admin mode in systemsettings. * Scott Kitterman (aka ScottK) He saved our rear ends after kde4libs accidentally got uploaded to Intrepid main with the 4.1.0 tarball.

ScottK stayed up half the night sponsoring our fixed packages. Without him Intrepid alpha 5 would be quite broken to say the least. Trust me, I lived without plasma whilst assisting in getting all the kde packages ready for a rebuild. I feel like an alt-tab-y Mac user now.

Anyway, the 4.1.1 packages sport a number of improvements. Beyond the numerous upstream fixes mentioned here, the Kubuntu packaging is probably in the best state they’ve ever been, not that they were bad for 4.1.0 or anything. 😉

If you see a Kubuntu ninja around on IRC, give them a thanks. It was a good job all around.